Recent content on My Little Brain Attic
(Which commander decks make the cut when you’re limited to a carry-on, why my entire LGS backpack can’t come with me, what the con tax actually costs, and the slightly uncomfortable question of why I’m flying to another country to buy cardboard I could order from my sofa.) MagicCon Amsterdam is five weeks away 17th to the 19th of July at the RAI and I’ve hit the stage of…
(What an AI answer actually costs in electricity and water, where the damage splits between training and running, whether a 5060 Ti or an M4 Mac mini at home is genuinely greener than ChatGPT, and how far the tiny models that run on a phone have come.) As everyone knows, I’ve been playing around with AI lately for some projects, some you might find interesting, others you might not. My…
(A friend’s Twitch stream happened, the chat was great, the VOD wasn’t saved. Here’s how I built a system so that doesn’t matter anymore - the tools, the reasoning, and why LTO-7 tape ended up as the cold storage answer.) There’s a Twitch stream I missed a couple of months ago. A friend of mine, not a big creator, just someone who streams occasionally and has a decent…
(What to actually bring to a UK con as a cosplayer, why a handler will change your life, and what I’ve learned wandering around with a kit bag full of safety pins and blister plasters.) I didn’t set out to become the person people flag down in a corridor because their corset has split. It happened gradually. First con I attended, I watched someone try to duct-tape a wing back onto…
(A companion to my Proton Mail post, the wider field of privacy email providers, what their controversies actually mean, and which service is the least likely to get you identified.) If you read my last post, you’ll know I landed on Proton Mail as my email home after finally cutting ties with Gmail and Outlook in 2025. One practical thing worth knowing if you go that route before we get into…
(Proton Mail is genuinely better than Gmail. It’s also not a magic shield. The recent controversies matter - here’s what they actually mean.) I’ve been meaning to write something about Proton Mail for a while. The recent reporting on the Stop Cop City protesters in Atlanta, specifically the revelation that payment data tied to their Proton Mail account was used to identify and…
(We’re generating more data than at any point in human history. We’re also storing it on media that’s never been more fragile. Here’s what that trade-off actually looks like.) I was going to write a blog post about this other blog post I read in 2024 that was shared on Hacker News about data longevity but better late than never, right? I also can’t find the blog that…
(Hugo sold me on speed, security and simplicity. It delivered on all three. It also came with a handful of frustrations nobody warns you about upfront.) I’ve been running this blog on Hugo for a couple of months now and I still think it was the right call over WordPress. The build times are near instant, there’s nothing to patch, and the security picture is dramatically simpler but…
(CDNs sound like an enterprise concern until you realise they’re the single biggest thing you can do for a small static site’s speed, security, and cost. Here’s how I picked one.) After settling on Hugo as my static site generator and landing on Namecheap for my domain and hosting, I still had one more decision to make. My Hugo build lives on Namecheap’s shared hosting, but…
(Picking a domain registrar sounds boring until you realise you’re trusting a company with your online identity, your privacy, and your wallet for years to come.) When I decided to leave WordPress and move to a static site, I also had to rethink where I was registering and hosting my domain. My old setup was with HawkHost fine for a WordPress blog and almost any other project. They are truly…
(If you’ve been watching the WordPress drama unfold, worried about security, or just want a faster blog, this is the story of my switch - Hugo first, Jekyll on the side.) On my previous blog I used WordPress, running on a shared hosting server with HawkHost. It did the job, in the way WordPress always does the job: you stop noticing the friction because it’s permanent. There’s…
(If you’ve been interested in the reason why I’m launching a blog in 2026, the ideas behind it and whether a blog is right for you.) Initially I was going to start my blog at the end of 2025, but as my homepage tagline suggests, I’m often unreliable. A plethora of people have said if I had the drive I’d have taken over the world by now. Either way, there has been a large…